“Nothing,” she answered, with difficulty.  “But, after bearing all this, it seems hard to think that you don’t want me to be—­to be separated from my crutches.  Because they have belonged to me always—­you think they always must.”

“Barbara!  When you’ve always understood me, must I begin explaining to you now?  I’ve never had anything that belonged to you, and I thought you wouldn’t mind, if it was something you didn’t need any more—­I wouldn’t care what it was—­if——­”

“I see,” she interrupted.  A blinding flash of insight had, indeed, made many things wonderfully clear.  “Here—­wouldn’t you rather have this?”

[Sidenote:  A Knot of Blue Ribbon]

She slipped a knot of pale blue ribbon from the end of one of her long, golden braids, and gave it to him.

“Yes,” he said.  Then he added, anxiously, “are you sure you don’t need it?  If you do——­”

“If I do,” she answered, smiling, “I’ll either get another, or tie my braid with a string.”

Outwardly, they were back upon the old terms again, but, for the first time since the mud-pie days, Barbara was self-conscious.  Her heart beat strangely, heavy with the prescience of new knowledge.  When Roger rose from his chair with a bit of blue ribbon protruding from his coat pocket, she laughed hysterically.

But Roger did not laugh.  He bent over her, with all his boyish soul in his eyes.  She crimsoned as she turned away from him.

[Sidenote:  Please?]

“Please?” he asked, very tenderly.  “You did once.”

“No,” she cried, shrilly.

Roger straightened himself instantly.  “Then I won’t,” he said, softly.  “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to—­ever.”

XVI

Betrayal

The long weeks dragged by and, at last, the end of Barbara’s imprisonment drew near.  The red-haired young man who had previously assisted Doctor Conrad came down with one of the nurses and removed the heavy plaster cast.  The nurse taught Miriam how to massage Barbara with oils and exercise the muscles that had never been used.

“Doctor Conrad told me,” said the red-haired young man, “to take your father back with me to-morrow, if you were ready to have him go.  The sooner the better, he thought.”

[Sidenote:  Love and Terror]

Barbara turned away, with love and terror clutching coldly at her heart. 
“Perhaps,” she said, finally.  “I’ll talk with father to-night.”

Her own forgotten agony surged back into her remembrance, magnified an hundred fold.  Fear she had never had for herself strongly asserted itself now, for him.  “If it should come out wrong,” she thought, “I could never forgive myself—­never in the wide world.”

When the doctor and nurse had gone to the hotel and Miriam was busy getting supper, Ambrose North came quietly into Barbara’s room.

“How are you, dear?” he asked, anxiously.